HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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Less virtuous than it seems: The motivations behind priestly vocations in Catholic Sri Lanka
No full textThe formation of Catholic seminarians in Sri Lanka is dependent on rigorous prayer and study routines that are designed to shape a seminarian’s disposition towards religious life. These mechanisms are geared towards transforming youthful desires into virtuous dispositions for the priesthood. However, seminary recruiters also use a range of incentives that have to do with material comforts and quality of life to attract young men to seriously consider their religious vocation. Although these incentives are usually downplayed to emphasize a seminarian’s spiritual response to their “calling,” they constitute an important tool that helps prospective priests reaffirm their vocation in times of doubt. The motivations behind a religious vocation are complex assemblages that emerge from the spiritual, symbolic, and material concerns of young men in contemporary South Asia
Ethical pedagogies and/of relationality
No full textIn the introduction to this special section, I discuss the way in which a focus on pedagogy in ethical practice can provide insights regarding the multifaceted nature of subjectivity, as well as the tendency of ethical learning, broadly understood, to establish new forms of relationality. I interrogate the way in which pedagogy is currently discussed in the anthropology of ethics, working to develop an understanding based on the notion of contingency. These points emerge from the ethnographic and theoretical insights in the articles in this special section, which examine sites and processes of ethical learning across various religious and secular domains in Asia. Precisely because the articles in the collection draw on various theoretical perspectives on ethics and encompass a wide scope of ethnographic contexts, they enable a conversation about the way in which various ethics of relationality are socialized, negotiated, and potentially transformed in the process
Law as ritual: Evoking an ideal order
No full textIn the modern state most laws enshrine practical social norms in a way that everyone can be aware of. Laws take a legalistic form, as generalizing rules and abstract categories. But turning to historical and ethnographic examples, we find legalistic rules that do not bear a neat resemblance to the details and disputes of quotidian life. This raises questions about their purposes and effects. Some of the earliest laws ever made—in Mesopotamia, Israel, and Rome—consisted of ostensibly practical rules, yet they evidently enshrined grander social visions. In this article I examine the connections between the practical and the symbolic. An analogy with ritual performance suggests that even partial sets of laws may connect people with visions of justice and order, thereby garnering loyalty and helping to legitimize the aspirations of the law-makers
Facets of charity: Muslim ethics, postcolonial dynamics, and community-making in Portugal
No full textThis article examines the networks of charity developed by Muslims to discuss community-making in Portugal. Giving allows donors to create affective and moral spaces of communal life with recipients of aid that move beyond the ethical and pious dimensions of charity. By exploring past and present postcolonial links between two Muslim groups in Portugal, I argue that acts of charity allow us to explore the material conditions of Muslim groups in Europe and the tensions emerging from power hierarchies. This article demonstrates that home-making is built in the unstable and ambiguous adjustments between the narratives of horizontal belonging to the umma and the power relations that cut across Muslim communities
Introduction: Movement, faith, and home in Muslim communities in the diaspora
No full textHere we introduce a special section that spans this and the next issue of Hau. The articles in the section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it entails, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. Thus, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling
Movement, faith, and home in Muslim communities in the diaspora (Part 2)
No full textThis is the introduction to the second part of a special section that spans two issues of Hau (14 [1] and 14 [2]). The articles in the special section focus on home and home-making and all that this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places. Across countries and continents, across sects and in different local contexts, with diverse histories of migration, the articles explore what home is and what it means, as a material place in lived experience and as an imaginary place, often remembered or felt as loss. Home is an ideal underpinned by home-making practices and experiences, and thus by affect, dispositions, and emotions. As a consequence, home is always structured and embodied, but also a creative and dynamic act of dwelling